In September 2012, Rare Book School received an $896,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a new three-year fellowship program at RBS, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography. An additional grant of $783,000 was awarded in October 2013 to fund a second cohort of twenty RBS-Mellon Fellows. The aim of the fellowship program is to reinvigorate bibliographical studies within the humanities by introducing doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty to specialized skills, methods, and professional networks for conducting advanced research with material ...Read More

Coeur d'Alene (ISO 639-3 crd/Salish, USA, henceforth CRD) is a language no longer spoken by children. Ethnologue classifies this language as nearly extinct, with only two elderly native speakers. However, the Coeur d'Alene community has a strong interest in revitalizing the language. Under the direction of locally controlled language programs, a number of community members have passed through the language programs. In spite of the fact that Coeur d'Alene was, in the early part of the 20th century, one of the best-documented Salish languages, the community has access to precious ...Read More

DEL supports projects to develop and advance knowledge concerning endangered human languages. Made urgent by the imminent death of roughly half of the approximately 7000 currently used languages, this effort aims to exploit advances in information technology to build computational infrastructure for endangered language research.

Of the 6,000-7,000 languages now spoken globally, it is estimated that 90% will be replaced by dominant languages, and that the majority will be extinct by the end of this century. The loss of language entails the loss of cultural, ecological, and a myriad of other types of knowledge. For the scientific community, it is akin to losing a species. One area in which government agencies, scholars, and community members have placed great effort is developing long term digital language resources grounded in documentation, preservation and maintenance. As a result ...Read More